Weigel Will Find a Way to Sneer

Sneer Will Find a Way: Note to Dave Weigel, who found a way to turn Thomas B. Edsall’s clarifying post on Obama’s strategy into a constituency-pleasing sneer at Fox News: 1) It’s “Edsall,” not “Edsell;” 2) The Ruy Teixeira essay Edsall commented on was co-authored by John Halpin, not by John Judis; 3) It’s “Teixeira” Not “Texiera;” 4) Fox’s headline, “NYT: Obama Campaign Plans to Abandon White Working Class” is a completely fair summary of Edsall’s thesis, which (as Weigel himself notes) is that “preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.” It’s the New York Times’ headline (“The Future of the Obama Coalition”) that’s scandalously boring. 5) Teixeira and Halpin’s point isn’t just that Obama will be “continuing to lose voters who have been voting Republican since 1966”–voters he only got 40% of in 2008. It’s that Obama should be planning to make up for unprecedented presidential-year losses among these less educated whites–in Edsall’s words, a “repetition of 2010, when white working-class voters supported Republican House candidates by a record-setting margin of 63- 33.” That’s not a non-story, as both right-wing Fox and left-wing Talking Points Memo understood. 6) Is it really true that Obama “isn’t switching policies in or out of a playbook because whites won’t vote for him,” as Weigel confidently asserts? Arguably, for example, Obama might have not delayed a decision on the jobs-producing Keystone XL Pipeline if he were as eager to mobilize a base of working class whites as a base of elite environmentalists. And he almost certainly would pursue an altered immigration policy–focusing more on protecting jobs from illegal undocumented unauthorized immigrant competition and less on suing states (like Arizona and Alabama) that have passed tough enforcement measures. …